Commissioning End of Life Care: Act & Early
July 4 2011This guidance published by the National Council for Palliative Care aims to help healthcare commissioners to prioritise early action on end of life care to ensure people’s choices are met and to avoid unnecessary emergency hospital admissions.
Commissioning End of Life Care: Act & Early
Poor end of life care is rushed and unplanned often resulting in unnecessary, and expensive trips to Accident and Emergency with crisis admissions to hospital.
End of life care accounts for a high proportion of NHS spending. Evidence suggests that many end of life care patients have no medical need to be in hospital. Improving primary care management of end of life care is clearly a top priority for commissioners.
The purpose of this briefing is to help practitioners to identify the immediate priority actions to commission effective end of life care, focusing on steps which will make the most difference initially and can be seen as ‘quick wins’.
